While everyone obsesses over the monthly payrolls report, which on a trailing 12 month basis is once indicating the creation of roughly 2 million jobs each year, or roughly where it was before the crisis (red line chart below), one aspect that is largely ignored is the amount of hiring.
Why is hiring important?
Because that is the actual process by which those without a job end up with a job. And as we just learned today after the latest JOLTS release, which showed that there were over 4 million job openings (4,001 to be precisely) for the first time since 2008, a far more important number is the update on Hires which at 4.5 million barely changed from last month, but more importantly, is barely a fraction of where it should be based on the number of job gains reported by the BLS monthly. The chart below confirms this stunning discrepancy: a surge in jobs with barely half the pre-recession hiring?
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How does one explain this discrepancy in which the US economy supposedly is growing at its historic peak pace while hiring is at half the peak pace? Simple: the gains in nonfarm payrolls are due a decline in layoffs and other separations, not an increase in hirings: i.e., normal labor demand driven growth.
Which means that anyone hoping for a brisk increase in wages, i.e. worker leverage, is in for a prolonged shock.
The chart above simply shows that the leverage is and continues to be with the employers - instead of letting people go (or workers quitting at their volition) at anything close to a traditional pace, employers have a huge bargaining chip - a job. Because if a worker does not want to perform a job, tough: there are about 3 people willing to fight for every job opening. It also means that those who lose their job will find it doubly more difficult time to reenter the workforce as there simply is not enough hiring.
Which means that wage deflation, at least among prevailing jobs, will continue leading to declining real disposable income, a declining in personal savings and the continued use of "student loans" (since credit card deleveraging continues) to fund everyday lifestyles, at least until such time as the hiring trend has normalized.
The really bad news: while such a normalization will eventually happen, according to our back of the envelope calculations, it will take place some time in... 2020.